Digital Distribution and the New Ecology of Customer Expectations

We’ve written previously about the possible impact of digital distribution on the impulse purchase, and will have more to say in the future. But something else in the equation occured to me after a handful of particularly frustrating attempts to buy music online recently. Something that’s obvious but goes unstated in discussions about preserving traditional industry practices.

I was irritated a few months ago when I placed Hjaltalín’s wonderful album Sleepdrunk Seasons in my iTunes wishlist playlist, only to discover when I went back to purchase it on payday that the territorial rights had changed and it was no longer available via the Canadian store. (I was eventually able to purchase it via the record label, Kimi).

This week I have tried and failed to purchase Cliff Martinez’s beautiful score to Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, and — astonishingly — The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

(And if you’re looking for music which is not available on iTunes, discovering that the record label in question is a subsidiary of one of the majors is really, really bad news. Small labels appear to have discovered the benefits of having in-house mp3 stores. The majors? Not so much.)

A few years ago, this kind of thing would have been mildly irritating but not all that surprising. So your local record store was sold out or didn’t carry that particular release. That’s inconvenient — but with those cumbersome industrial production processes and a physical supply chain to negotiate, it wasn’t going to shake you up. You were used to it. You’d place a special order, order it yourself online and wait a few days, or just give up. Oh well. Nobody has a right to everything.

Nowadays, though, these oversights feel absolutely unforgivable — not least because so many of the alternatives (the secondhand stores, the large independents like Sam’s, the in depth assortment at large branches of HMV) have disappeared precisely because of the benefits promised by iTunes and its legal and illegal competitors.

This reminds me of something that Dustin Curtis wrote about recently on his amazingly attractive website. The customer experience is only as good as its weakest link. iTunes is an astonishingly good customer experience — in the context of everything that preceded it — and offers a breadth of selection unlike anything the average consumer has ever known. But when you can’t get something that should be easy — easy — it feels as if they don’t care.

And for the most part these things aren’t the fault of iTunes, Amazon, or other digital retailers. Territorial rights are a massive barrier to the promise of universal availability. But there has been a sea change, I think, in customer’s tolerance for a lack of product availability. In the past, it was possible that the retailer was trying but that they weren’t very good. This still persists with traditional retailers (Metro, I’m looking at you). But where digital product is the norm, it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. Instead, it feels like the retailer isn’t even trying — that they just don’t care. That’s a terrible, terrible face for a major retailer to show to their customers.

As industrial production and distribution processes fade as intermediate factors between content producer and content consumer, the expectations for customer service are skyrocketing. Traditional retail spaces are being redesigned around exceptional customer service rather than stack-and-sell local warehousing. This is the wrong time to be hiding behind the walls of territorial copyright, which will only make customers feel justified in acquiring product in illegal ways. For these reasons it’s encouraging to see New Zealand effectively scrap its existing copyright laws, and Australia begin to dismantle territorial copyright.

As the ebooks revolution gathers steam, this will be critical for Amazon, Shortcovers, and other contenders to bear in mind. It’s all about availability and customer service. The customer will not forgive you for slamming the door in their face. They will not wait for copyright to catch up. They will sign out of the system.

Digital distribution won’t level the playing field. It will tilt it in the customer’s favour.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

Can I interest you in some slightly used veterinary supplies?

We just got back from a trip to Saluda, NC’s Coon Dog Day. While I’m trying to figure out what there is to be said about the 2 days I spent thinking nobody else was tweeting from there because I didn’t see any hits for #coondogday09 other than tweets from wifey and me, let’s consider how I can mitigate an egregious veterinary expense with the help of Twitter.

While getting our dog caught up on all the vaccinations we knew she’d need to get across the border (note: they don’t check) we took the added precaution of buying a flea & tick treatment to last the duration of our trip (note: it was a good idea). Cost: $72 for 4 individually blister-sealed doses. Each dose is good for a month.

Thing is, we were only gone for 5 days. We administered a full dose only because it seemed to be an all-or-nothing sort of deal. The other 3 in the pack are each going to expire in airtight isolation before we have occasion to use them. What to do?

I’m going to post them for sale online and list my Twitter ID along with contact info. I don’t expect anyone would buy pet medication from a total stranger (cheap as I am, not even I’d do that) but I think I might have a chance to recover a bit of my expense and spare someone else most of the cost of the meds if I open myself to a background check. I’m hoping that my 600+ tweets taken in whole or in part will give a perfect stranger sufficient confidence in my character (or at least the part that applies in matters of veterinary commerce) to take advantage of a bargain price. Good, bad, or indifferent, I’ll post the results here.

Retro Soundtracks to Imaginary Heist Movies

Brian Gossett’s Heist series of mixes are exactly the kind of thing content systems need to evolve to allow: a fabulous concept (who doesn’t want retro location-themed soundtracks to imaginary heist movies?), brilliant execution, and (every bit as important) gorgeous custom cover art:

I am a huge fan of heist films. They exude a sense of excitement and wonderment. The recipe for a great caper is a seemingly impossible score, specialized team members, exotic sports cars, gadgets galore, globetrotting, beautiful yet conniving women, a dash of good humor, and an impeccable musical backdrop. The latter brings us to my latest series of mixes, The Heist Series. I have chosen artists who have scored classic and modern heist films. To add color to these mixes are complimentary tracks that flavor the ambience of the narrative. Each subsequent mix to follow, will personify a city in which our fictitious caper takes place.

Highly recommended.

(via design work life)

Go out on the Town with Your Favourite Novel

As Mark hinted the other day, AcrossAir’s augmented reality iPhone apps suggest what some aspects of the networked book concept might resemble.

Indeed, it’s surprising that there aren’t already iPhone apps that replicate such fine book/city tours as already exist.

• Don Herron’s legendary Dashiell Hammett tour of San Francisco
• Wes Morgan’s Searching for Suttree resource
• Cathy’s Steele’s highly exclusive In the Skin of a Lion Toronto tour (ideally with photographs and other materials provided by the City of Toronto Archives)
• Any number of Hemingway-related Paris tours
• All those Ulysses-themed Dublin tours

Knoxville's bridges, from Wes Morgan's Searching for Suttree

These seem like fertile ground for an app developer, particularly given the possibility of add-ons available via OS 3′s in-app billing.

On the subject of subway-based iPhone apps, there’s Exit Strategy NYC (via Kottke). Does anyone have plans to take the TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide in a similar direction?

Cover Art You Can Tell Your Friends About

It’s nice to see HarperCollins UK foregrounding the gorgeous Richard Bravery cover designs for Michael Chabon’s backlist by at least making large versions available for download. As we’ve discussed before, there are some fabulous opportunities available for content distributors who understand how the packaging of their product engages in an ongoing dialogue with the content — and that there are more and more opportunities for exactly these exchanges with social media and digital distribution. Content mediators — publishers, marketers, retailers, distributors — who understand how to enrich and enable those dialogues are going to reach more people than those who do not. Making cover art available for download and sharing is the very least that they should be doing.

Great also to see these attractive designs getting some love.

While there are now more book cover blogs than you can shake a stick at, The Art of the Title Sequence is another wonderful resource, foregrounding an art form which is too often seen as purely functional.

Discovered: Daytum.com

For the analytics obsessed among us, the new edition of Wired magazine (17.07) has a cover story about living by the numbers. This human compulsion to measure everything is old news except that there are new tools to capture your personal metrics. One tool that Wired missed is DayTum.com a delicious-like service for sharing your data. I am coming around on this site after spending more time at FlowingData.com and following Daytum’s founder Nicholas Felton’s annual reports and other work. The site will be way more interesting when the dataset is large enough to show relationships between users — anonymously of course.

More Video Essays by Matt Zoller Seitz

Some more superb Matt Zoller Seitz links, on Benjamin Button (be sure to view the video version), the follow shot, and Steve McQueen.

Here’s why this kind of work is important. Criticism can help you live your life:

By stripping away the political context that made Gump a pop culture hot potato, Button isolates and magnifies the story’s emotional appeal: the sense that, no matter how strongly we believe in the notion that each person is the captain of his or her own ship, the unfortunate fact is that most of us are passengers on this voyage. When we wish to change course, it’s difficult, often impossible to get the captain’s attention, and even if we manage to do so, the vessel is so enormous, and so beholden to the wishes of everyone else on board, that altering its course even infinitesimally is often beyond the realm of possibility. Button is entirely about this sense of life: the realization that we’re quite small and powerless in the great scheme of things, and the most sensible response to this realization is to try to be as caring and decent as we can and appreciate the life we’ve got.

Wes Anderson, Metadata, and Susan Sontag on Filter Failure

Interpretation is Like So Industrial Age

I’ve been thinking recently about Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation, which seems today both entirely uncontroversial and extraordinarily ahead of its time. Published in 1964, the piece suggests that our standard approach to criticism — interpretation — focuses too narrowly on the idea of extracting a meaning from a work of art. This approach, Sontag argues, under-privileges the sensory experience that exposure to art allows us (and indeed requires from us).

In Sontag’s formulation, criticism’s job should instead be to

make works of art — and, by analogy, our own experience — more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

The thrust of the essay is that an intellectual revolution in criticism is required; Sontag’s insouciant self-assurance that she is the smartest person in the room is the only thing that keeps it from becoming a polemic. But her essay seems so non-controversial today because it would become a mainstay of Postmodernism 101 reading lists. The central point itself — the rebellion, at least, against artificial division between content and form — lacks any sort of bite now.

Filter Failure Goes Two Ways

But it seems so visionary and ahead of its time because it touches on the problem of ‘information overload’. In 1964 the techniques of industrial mass production had been applied to art for long enough to begin changing popular culture in radical ways. But the surfeit of information that she describes is even more characteristic of digital distribution than it was of the narrow period in which Sontag was writing.

Sontag argues that in an age of cultural over-production, the approach to criticism she recommends is necessary because of the volume of sensory input to which we are exposed:

Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life — its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

In short, criticism should help our filters, not by constraining our inputs but by widening our ability to process them.

An Erotics of Art — Brought to You by iMovie

That leads to the second way in which the essay seems so ahead of its time: adoption of the approach it recommends is so dependent on tools which have only recently become widely available. Criticism that explores the sensory richness of the work it describes needs to be able to interact directly — concurrently with — the work itself. It needs to be available within and during the experience — not outside and alongside it.

Sontag called for “acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art… essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.”

Matt Zoller Seitz’s superb series of essays on the influences and style of Wes Anderson seem to me to epitomize exactly that approach. It’s curious that the Moving Image Source have laid out the text of the essays more prominently, because it’s really in the video accompaniment (available for each installment by clicking the small ‘video’ thumbnail below the image on the right) that the approach shines. And does so in a way that suggests the promise of the kind of ‘segmented metadata’ that we have outlined here in the past.

The essays are supple, thrilling explorations of the surface of Anderson’s work; they augment the pleasure that can be derived from viewing them. In a very real sense, they use technology — in this case, presumably, some relatively widely-available video editing software — to enrich the place of art in our lives.

Superb work, fascinating viewing. Highly recommended. And good for you. Who are you to argue with Susan Sontag?

Why Margins Are No Longer Wide Enough for Marginalia

… or, Charles Dickens Wants to Show You London

1. Arguing About Reading

Nathan and I had one of those “we’re not as smart as we think we are” / “thank god we aren’t crazy” moments at BookCamp Toronto last weekend while listening to Peter Brantley talk about the possibilities of “the networked book”.

When your regular conversations about the implications of digital distribution tend to be vociferous discussions about publishing — intellectual property, maintaining cost structures, etc. — it’s easy to find yourself thinking far less about the implications for reading. But the discussion that Peter initiated was an exciting tease about some of those possibilities (before it veered, perhaps inevitably, to the “safe ground” of industry change). And it was reassuring that they are some of the things that we Datachondrians have been kicking around for a little while, in particular about technologies that will enable granular user-generated metadata.

But let’s zoom out for a moment.

2. Getting Content to Audiences

Suppose you could tour London in the company of Charles Dickens or Samual Pepys. See the Yosemite Valley alongside John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Read Invisible Man while listening to the jazz that Ralph Ellison heard while writing it.

The 26th President's memoirs...

... will not fit into your North Face Jester backpack

There is a vast amount of content out there that already exists, but is barricaded behind forms — whether physical items like books or intellectual concepts like genres — that prevent it from reaching its natural audiences. Exposure to a larger audience is always a win-win situation: more readers, more reading experiences, and an exponential increase in contacts to even more audiences. That isn’t just more entertainment value or more revenue: there’s an obvious gain to society when more people are exposed to more ideas: those ideas can be put to better use, often in ways not imagined by the original authors. As the exhaustive discussion about long tails and fragmented markets has shown, we’ve already seen tremendous progress in bringing content to previously unrealized audiences. But to some extent the physical forms and intellectual conception of cultural items like “the book” and “the film” remain obstacles. The weekend visitor to Yosemite might love to hear what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about Half Dome, but doesn’t necessary want to read through (still less carry) his diaries alongside essential camping gear. Why not direct them straight to the paragraphs that matter to them?

There is, of course, a lot of institutional resistance to breaking down these units and releasing this content, which would essentially to allow readers to make use of it in whatever ways they can imagine. Some of these forces are legal (copyright); some are economic: what business model would continue to allow the production of value that the publishing industry is currently structured around? Some forces are more purely conceptual: what is the role of the author? Where does the involvement of the author — their original idea, their intent, their control of presentation, their control of interpretation — end? Where, for that matter, does it begin?

But there are tremendous countervailing forces — namely the interpretative processes that readers already employ while consuming content. Readers, listeners, and viewers already associate the content they experience with memories, relationships, and other pieces of content. In the past these have been primarily personal associations. They have been communal only in the narrow set of situations that technology allowed: discussions among friends, within book clubs, and so forth. But they have been there, obscured somewhat by the fact that they left no physical mark upon the transmitter of the content (although many of us treasure a particular edition of a book because of the emotional associations that it carries: who gave it to us; what we were doing while we were reading it). As more than a few participants in the BookCamp conversations pointed out, some of the most meaningful “reading” experiences we have had were due to the conversations that they provoked with colleagues and friends, or the access to memories that they allowed.

All this, now, is possible to a degree and in methods hitherto unimaginable. You can already see it taking place. Set up a Twitter search for the title of your favourite novel and you will see, in realtime, the ways in which it is slotting itself into other people’s lives. In doing so it is enriching those new readers and (since it is happening in ways so different from your own experiences) actually enriching the book itself as an amalgamation — a touchstone — of collective experience. For the first time, books are visible not just for what they contain but for what they release.

And users, given the tools, will enable, organize, and share that universe of possibilities.

3. A World of Associations

So what could that look like?

Suppose that users could geotag passages of text, works of art and design, pieces of music, audio clips, moments of film. This would allow you to engage in tours of cities, landscapes, and parks with a variety of contextually relevant materials (further reading, illustrations, maps; music and artwork inspired by these locations). Art galleries and museums would not only be augmented by those now ubiquitous curated audio materials, but by user-generated recommendations and commentary on what to see, how to look at it, and what music and writing has been inspired by or associated with it. As these user-generated elements age, they become instant historical tours, sitting alongside (for example) the impressions of Samuel Pepys, Thomas de Quincey, and Charles Dickens to enrich your experience of Oxford Street or Charring Cross Road.

There are obvious business applications — the links to real-world and online goods and services, where you could purchase a poster of that William Turner painting, that reproduction of Harry Beck’s first underground map, or a copy of the Dickens novel that you where just listening to an excerpt from.

Then there are the in-your-armchair experiences. Suppose you could write a soundtrack for your favourite novel? Suppose you could read Blood Meridian with in-text prompts to the music it has directly inspired, to the music that people have associated with it? Inline explanatory footnotes and historical information; photographs and contemporary artwork; moments from classic Western movies that illustrate its spirit and landscape?

Imagine purchasing a work of literature with an interwoven ‘annotation’ pack to provide explanatory material — or a ‘translation packs’ for ESL students? A book club pack that could allow groups of users to share tags and embed conversations about specific passages. Imagine a book at which — within the text — the author and readers were staging a real-time discussion on specific passages. Imagine if cookbooks would suggest similarly-tagged recipes or dishes appropriate to a menu, and point to the location of a local specialty store for cooking materials.

In short — imagine everything that can happen to content if it can be broken into distinct pieces which can be rated and evaluated on the basis of their contextual usefulness, rather than only on their relationship to ‘the rest of the book’.

4. Liberating Content

Much of the challenge will of course be about the interface design — a theme underlined, in a variety of contexts, in a number of Saturday’s sessions. What is the physical product design, and the information design, that would enable this reading experience? As Nathan pointed out, we should not assume that this need be a traditional book-based reading: a device should allow ‘media switching’ to let you to continue to enjoy the content regardless of your current physical activity. Should each chapter, point, paragraph, sentence, or word contain ‘hooks’ on which readers could hang associations, discussions, and other aspects of metadata? Should this entire question, as we have argued before, be available for constant redefinition in whatever terms make sense for the “reader”?

These appear to be narrowly technical points, although there is a big conceptual debate behind them. As Peter Brantley suggested, the recent Google book search settlement, by entrenching the concept of “the work” as a unitary entity defined by authorial intent, may reinforce the legal and conceptual walls mentioned above.

But the possibilities here are enormous, and the pressure may become unstoppable to liberate content from the old physical forms we built to allow its distribution. Ultimately, if our legal, economic and conceptual receptacles cannot adapt, then writers and readers may simply opt out of the system. Their cultural works will emerge independent of the copyright/publishing system and immediately sit in an open-source universe alongside Antony and Cleopatra and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, awaiting the arrival of content from a historically narrow period — the period in which copyright held sway and books were closed from the designs of their readers.

Infinite Summer and the Nike+ Model for Books

An audience participant at one of today’s BookCamp Toronto sessions brought my attention to Infinite Summer, a coordinated, communal effort to read David Foster Wallace’s giant 1996 novel Infinite Jest this summer (kick-off date: June 21st). I realized that it was a manifestation of something that had been sitting at the back of my head all day, namely that the Nike+ model of social networking is an outstanding example of the kind of things that could be achieved with books.

I started making use of Nike+ only a few weeks ago, having finally reignited a teenage enjoyment for running earlier in the year in an attempt to shake off some late-Winter malaise. Part of the appeal for me was the gadgetry — the little transmitter to attach to your shoe; the excuse to buy a cute little iPod Nano; the seamless integration that lets you listen to your current distance and pace at helpful increments (or whenever you’re desperate for the reassurance that surely I must be halfway by now).

But it immediately became clear that the technology was really just bait for people just like me. The gadgets are transparent enabling devices; the truly addictive qualities are the social aspects — the ability to indulge my personal instincts in a communal setting that can be moderated on whatever level feels most comfortable to me. I can save all of my ‘runs’ — my distances and performance — and make them public, on a one-by-one basis, as I wish. I can see my workout history at a glance. I can design a route and share it with the community. I can set goals for myself, and have the system provide a training scheme to help me meet those goals. I can ask other community members for advice, perspective, and so forth. In short, it lets me take a personal activity — something that, in truth, can sometimes require some effort to maintain — and expose it to a huge variety of social prompts to reward me and encourage me to keep it up and develop it. This would be bad, of course, for most addictions, but for exercise it seems like a relatively benign pleasure.

Imagine if each of those bars was a chapter of Moby Dick. Yes, the etymology and extracts chapters are hills.

So too for reading. There was a lot of chat at BookCamp Toronto about the music industry: how and whether iTunes, MySpace, etc, provide models for authors and publishers as the terrain of publishing changes with digital technology. The music industry is a great example of what can go wrong if you attempt to fight the inevitable influence of progress and tell your customers that they are wrong to want what they want. But in truth it is a pretty poor example of what publishing could point to as a set of opportunities. That’s because the experience of consuming the ‘product’ is profoundly different. Reading is a much more public, communal activity than listening to music, even though you can piss off a lot more people by listening to music obnoxiously than reading, those Bible-shouting goons in Dundas Square notwithstanding. Reading — or, more widely, enjoying word-based content — is something we do in a shared medium (language) and do so against conceptual markers which are continually negotiated in a public setting (was this book good? is what it says true?). So it’s completely natural that communal models of the application of technology should be more comfortable fit for reading than those which are more narrowly purchase-based.

Seriously, you aren't going to read this on your own.

And then there are the door-stopper beasts. Who hasn’t balked at The Stones of Summer, Underworld, The Adventures of Augie March, Tristram Shandy, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Don Quixote, Moby Dick? Worthy undertakings, all, but certainly far more akin to committing yourself to a marathon than, say, exposing yourself to a famously challenging album. Setting forth on any of these reading adventures as part of a crowd — a group to set the goal and hold you to it, not by coercion but by exposing you to an additional set of pleasures – is a much more tolerable idea than having to beat through its dense and overgrown foliage on your own.

This is why book groups succeed, at least when they succeed as reading exercises rather than wine-guzzling gossipy gatherings. Online reading communities stand to offer even more, because they allow participants to filter out those people who are not dedicated to the challenge on the same level as themselves. The academic reader of Under the Volcano — looking for every stray reference and allusion to other words — is not me; I was just looking for someone to help me turn the pages. But, equally, that shouldn’t be the bored book club participant who would rather use the occasion to chat about their house repairs. Imagine how helpful it would be if you could simply mute that person whose comments about books always irritate because they stem so transparently from their own narrow and self-involved experiences. In online forums, you can do just that. I have seen the technology and it is good.

So — here’s the challenge: an open communal software solution that would let you share reading experiences; commit to goals (personal and shared); establish, share, and suggest training programmes for undertakings large and small (if Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a 5km run, Blood Meridian is the half-marathon and Suttree is the roaring leviathan); share your reading experiences in a social setting that can be adjusted on a case-by-case basis; link up with real-world events and gatherings in your local community; and probably provide some interface with a retail solution that would let you buy or access the book itself (and any related textual, audio, or video materials) in a seamless, instantaneous manner. And to do all of those things in ways that remind you how good it is that reading, uniquely, is both a solitary and a social endeavour.

In short: a slick, open, one-stop, cloud-based reading solution — something that offers all this and more — is the dream app for books. And I want to start using it like yesterday.

And with all of that said, I think I might have talked myself into a comparable enterprise for music. I listened to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the first time when I was 18, and my ears were entirely unprepared for it. But what if someone had first put together a “Bitches Brew training programme”? It would have taken me through the enjoyable but increasingly stale conventions of hard bop, Miles’s experimentation with the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, Wayne Shorter’s compositional odyssey, the influence of rock’s instrumentation, and the breakthrough of In a Silent Way. Then I would have been able to appreciate Bitches Brew as I appreciate it now. Although I still would have been infuriated that Columbia’s dodgy CD mastering made me buy it twice.